2009-03-30

What is the motive for her extremism? It’s the same as any Islamic fundamentalist. Both believe they have the absolute pipeline to truth and not only will neither brook any dissent, but for them death to the infidel/enemy is a “rational”, wished for, outcome. “Liberals are always against America,” she says, which makes them enemies of America. “We won’t have any enemies because we’re going to kill them.”

At the end of her book she quotes political philosopher Paul Johnson from Enemies of Society who says that “a man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings if he acquires the power.” The violent language in Coulter’s speeches, articles and books cannot be missed and must not be underestimated.

I’m surprised that some crazed right-winger hasn’t taken her seriously, deciding that, in the name of Coulter patriotism, it’s his duty to kill as many “liberals” as he can. Then, if captured alive, he can offer the “Ann Coulter defence”. Just as Islamic terrorists act in the name of Allah, he would be acting in the name of Ann. Murder in the name of ideology is neither new nor uncommon.

The historical trend is clear and Harper’s magazine (or some other publication) would be doing America, indeed the world, a service in reprinting its November 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” by historian Richard Hofstadter who, in presciently describing the Ann Coulter of today, said he used the term paranoid style “simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” of its followers.

He also writes about "paranoid fantasies of Hofstadter’s 1960s Goldwater fanatics".

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.…The laws of probability would dictate that part of…[the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.

Hofstadter might be "interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric" but there's no reason that 45 years later our left-winger Daniel Johnson can't be looking at the simple question of whether or not the 1964 article discusses a "sound program". After the fact, and after the work of none other than Miss Ann Coulter, we know that in fact the good Senator was onto something. There was an infamous conspiracy by a group of people paid by the Soviet Union to affect political change in the United States. Like all cell-structured conspiracies they weren't chumming around with each other in their off hours, which is why people like Goldwater and McCarthy had to be there saying anything in the first place.